Abandoned SURE-P clinic

For over two years, a multi-million naira fully-equipped healthcare facility built with SURE-P funds is lying fallow on the outskirts of Abuja. The hospital, equipped with baby cribs, beddings, operating table, scale, wheel chairs, office furniture, stretcher, syringes, gloves, maternity equipment, drugs, 10 KVA generating set, standard borehole, accommodation for staff, etc. is now covered by dust in sleepy TuganNasara town, just three kilometres outside Abuja.

In its current state, the primary health facility in TuganNasara represents an unpardonable undoing of SURE-P’s noble objectives that motivated construction of the clinic: “to increase use of maternal and child health services by the country’s rural populations through innovative demand and supply side interventions along the continuum of care.” Ironically, the health centre was completed 18 months before the government of Goodluck Jonathan and remains closed 18 months into the government of Muhammadu Buhari.

This anomaly is too obvious for citizens to miss the lack of genuine concern for the immediate community of TuganNasara in the Federal Capital Territory, and for those in more rural communities across the country. Undoubtedly, citizens in communities far from the capital are bound to worry about their own fate if a community so close to Abuja can suffer so much neglect at a time that the government can hardly afford any wastage. The implications of such neglect are too serious to be dismissed as an oversight.

One implication of the abandonment of a completed primary health centre is the deprivation of TuganNasara mothers and their children of direly needed healthcare, an implication well captured by some of the residents of the community housing an abandoned near state-of-the-art clinic: “We have children dying here frequently from preventable diseases but cannot access quality medical care even though we have a fully equipped clinic in our midst, it is very sad …That is the most unserious and unpatriotic thing to do against your citizens, some countries will jump in celebration to achieve this level of development but here, it is all about the money getting into the hands of some people and that’s all that matters.”

The neglect is more flagrant in a context in a country that is still rated low in maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, one in which one in every 10 children dies before his/her ffth birthday and one in 20 women still dies at childbirth. There is no better way to demonstrate the insensitivity of policymakers and implementers than the walking away of the Federal Government from a well-equipped health facility designed to reduce the social burden of the most vulnerable segment of the population.

This newspaper seizes the unfortunate situation created for residents of TuganNasara to remind the government of the imperative of proper coordination of policymaking and implementation. SURE-P, the mother of the TuganNasara health facility, popped up overnight without proper preparation for policy coordination in 2012 after reduction of fuel subsidy charges. Examples of failure to meet targets abound in other aspects of the programme: poverty alleviation, transportation, and infrastructure. Now that we have a Federal Government that has embarked on formal social security assistance to the vulnerable segment of the society, there should be no reason to allow the tradition of disconnect between policymakers in political parties and policy implementers in the civil service to spawn the egregious blunder of abandoning direly needed facilities made possible by taxpayers.

The short-term solution to this absurd situation is for the government to open immediately for service the TuganNasara health facility and others like it across the nation. And the long-term solution is for the Buhari government to steer its government’s institutional reform in a way that will make wasting of taxpayers’ money a thing of the past.